A. L. Buehrer What I Write and Why

Tuesday, January 27, 2015

Nothing
keeps me reading like secrets. In fact, I might even venture to say that nothing
is more important to a good plot than the ability to keep a secret.The
delicate art of hiding, hinting at, and revealing secrets is not only the
essence of a good mystery or suspense story. It’s also the driving force behind
novels of all kinds, all genera—the thing that keeps your reader’s eyes open.

Secrets
come in many forms. Commonly, characters harbor secrets: secrets of identity,
origin, motives, past conflicts, etc. It’s the author who has the secret of
their future, their purpose, their final decision. Settings have secrets: what
is this place? What happened here?

You have to decide how much you want to hint
at a secret. Sometimes it’s fun to startle a reader by bringing out a secret
suddenly that was never suggested, or even appears to contradict evidence that
you’ve arranged to cover it. It makes a brilliant plot twist if you can skew
information so that it seems to suggest something else, and then later reveal
what was really going on.

Hinting, however, is the language of
suspense. Some twists and blind curves can be used to surprise your readers out
of the blue, but those hints that almost can be pieced together—but not
quite—are what gives them a reason to keep perusing the story. Be conscious of
how much evidence you put forward, and how often. How frequently you hint at
some hidden element depends on how soon you intend to reveal it. If you’ve got
a secret you don’t want to reveal until the climax of a novel, don’t bring it
up in every chapter. Let your readers forget about it for a chapter or two now
and then, and take that time to develop some other subplot. If you keep
obsessing over a bit of information you’re not going to reveal until much
later, your reader will very likely become impatient with the whole thing. You
want your reader motivated and intrigued—not impatient.

Also, don’t give hints that are too obvious.
It drives people crazy if an author pretends to know less about something than
the reader already found out about. Don’t keep hinting about a secret that’s
already pretty much out of the bag.

Sometimes, when you finally do let a secret
out, you still don’t have to be obvious. Never over-explain anything. At least,
as far as I’m concerned, I like to be able to read a book a second time and
marvel at the author’s subtlety. If there’s something I didn’t fully catch
onto, I’ll probably go back and figure it out. It’s more fun for a reader to
feel like they’ve gotten in on a secret, than it is to feel like they’ve had it
all explained to them.